Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

There’s an old farmhouse near a river somewhere in Northern Germany where Alma, a little girl with blonde hair plays practical jokes on her maid; adolescent Erika stares longingly at a naked man with one leg; a brash young Angelika asserts her sexuality even as she hides her pain; and naive Lenka navigates her parents’ new home. All of this in and around a looming, ancient farmhouse full of repressed memories of violence and trauma… but separated by generations: WWI in the 1910s, the end of WWII in the 1940s, in East Germany in the1980s and the present day. Each chapter punctuated by a terrible thud, the sound of falling.

Sound of Falling is a complex, intricate and powerful new movie, that looks at a century of life in rural Northern Germany through the eyes of four girls and women, interweaving their separate stories throughout the entire film. It’s tender and horrifying, mundane and jaw-dropping. It’s co-written and directed by award-winning Berlin filmmaker Mascha Schilinski, her first feature after studying cinema at the Filmschule Hamburg and direction at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg. Her movie won the prestigious Jury Prize at Cannes, played at TIFF and is on the 2026 Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature.

I spoke with Mascha in Los Angeles via ZOOM.

Sound of Falling  opens theatrically in Canada on January 23rd, 2026.